My brother has decided to get a laptop for his wife for Christmas, she is currently using an emachines with 352 Celly (yaaaay I own't have to work on that relic anymore haha). Just about anything will be a massive step up but I want to help him find the best possible laptop for his budget. He says he can go up to $400 and would like to get it at a B&M so that restricts me to Sams' Club, Walmart, OfficeMax, or BestBuy.

She lives for scrapbooking. She is always working on projects with pictures and scrapbooking programs so that is what I would like to gear the specs to. He went into the new Sams Club in Wentzville and saw an HP G7 (Win8) with the A6-4400m cpu and HD7520G graphics that the M$ rep almost sold him on, but I talked him into waiting to see what I could come up with for his budget. For her purposes, would she be better served with a stronger Intel CPU and lesser graphics (like i3/i5 with either HD3000 or HD400) or lesser CPU and stronger discrete graphics (the A4/A6 line with 6xxx/7xxx)?

She has never used Win7 at all, so she would be jumping from XP to either Win7 or Win8. Either way she will have to learn a new way of navigating her O/S. I am thinking that all the Lappies with Win7 will start getting drastic clearance reductions for the upcoming holidays, so should he try to find something previous generation and Win7 on sale or go ahead and get her the newest generation Intel or AMD Laptop with Win8? And should he wait longer until a little closer to Christmas (Black Friday or later) for better deals on what is currently out there? Thanks for any help, Laptops are not my forte so all I know is what I have gleaned from googling.

I have come to the conclusion that "FaceBook" should be renamed "FacePalm"

Nice question. Firstly you need to understand that Apple make the best laptops. they are in a league of their own. However many people (myself included ) wont pay Apple prices and for $400 it seems you won't either. So that leaves Windows. Sony are the best make of Windows laptops but because they are Sony they think they can charge Apple prices even though they are no where near as good as Apple. The second best manufacturer of Windows laptops is Toshiba, who have very reasonable prices.

The reason Sony is best and Toshiba is the "second best" windows laptop, is because, my friend who owns a laptop repair shop told me that he does less repairs on Toshiba and Sony laptops than the other manufacturers and the common faults of each brand are typically much less severe.

Nope. Apple makes the worst laptops. EVER.
Anyone who thinks apple makes decent laptops need to be sent for a roundtrip around foxconn and attempt to break the laptop down into components-level
Quality is just sub-par, true they might be better than the rest in the past BUT IT IS NOT ANYMORE.
Those who thinks apple makes good laptops are usually really Apple-sheeps

If anything just avoid Toshiba, they are the worst and the new toshibas are made in china now and equally you won't see common faults for now but severe faults are bound to follow eventually
As for HP ... Just no. I stil have a swollen tongue even after 2 years of dumping them already and anyone who uses a HP knows very well... Especially TX1/2 owners (I WAS a owner)

As for the AMD, it's really really great performer FOR THE TDP. And please if any, i hate people going on about AMD being overheating and such and such ...
The only AMD laptops who overheat are HP and Fujitsu and well, for HP it's across the entire product line
Anyway back on topic, anything with a HD4000 will never come close to any Mobile Trinity GPU, probably a inch but we're talking A4 series there

NOTE: I hate bulldozer and piledriver didn't make me smile in any way. It did fix bulldozer but 2 generations and they only increased scalability but yet IPC is still below phenom by 2 ... in contrast IVB is 24 (I think? Might be 32) and phenom is 18
Imagine that. At least piledriver scales even higher than bulldozer. I hope AMD stops this scalability nonsense and get on with increasing IPC NOT decreasing ... Much higher clocks is only a bad thing as usually is tougher to control TDP-wise and well ... neither is it good for design ... because high frequencies are at work here requiring more precision in the process
But the mobile parts are somewhat quite low. Well it does scale well compared to Stars, anyway. 3.2GHz Turbo on a laptop with 35W TDP is not something to be sniffed at